Nddocument

Friday, March 29, 2019

Textolatry reached a critical level in the nineteenth cen- tury. To be exact, with it history came to an end. History, in the precise meaning of the word, is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progressive eluci- dation of ideas, a progressive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), a progressive process of comprehen- sion. If texts become incomprehensible, however, there is nothing left to explain, and history has come to an end.

During this crisis of texts, technical images were invented: in order to make texts comprehensible again, to put them under a magic spell — to overcome the crisis of history.